Friday, March 14, 2008

Changes in latitudes

Just a quick note to tell confirm something you might already know, and possibly may even give a damn about (or not):

By Opening Day, TATB will be moving over to Boston.com permanently, and the Blogspot version you see here will exist only as an archive. Yup, the little website is going all corporate on you. I'm fairly sure I even get to hire a cute secretary and a couple of Smithers-like yes-men. Remind me to get my agent to look into that.

Yeah, so . . . Boston.com it is. We agreed to a formal deal a few weeks ago, and as you might expect, I'm psyched. The increased readership and an actual paycheck for pecking out this nonsense are the obvious benefits. And I'm absolutely thrilled to have a chance to be a semi-prominent voice on what amounts to the electronic wing of the Globe. In terms of prestige, I realize of course that this puny blog is not even in the same ballpark as, say, being a featured writer in the actual printed sports section. But this is as close as I'll ever come to fulfilling that boyhood dream, and you can be damn sure I'm going to make the most of the opportunity.

It's funny, when I started this thing in December, 2004, I never would have considered this as a real possibility; I had no conscious aspirations to turn this into something bigger or profitable, none at all. I just wanted to write, man. I love my desk job at the Globe, I truly do, but as I've said here many times before, after so many years of cranking out columns about the Sox when I was in New Hampshire, it crushed me not to have a venue and a voice when the they finally won the World Series. Three-and-a-half years, roughly 1.3 million visitors, and another World Series title later, and that's still my mentality. I just want to write, man.

I am glad to report that not much is changing in the transition. I mean, yeah, it will look different - it'll be on the Boston.com template and will be cleaner and better organized and such - but the tone and content will remain the same. I'll still feature the Completely Random Baseball card and the Nine Innings column, live blogs and all the other staples you've come to, uh, tolerate. (Thought "love" was too strong of a word there, yes?) Even Rodney Craig, Ombudsman, is coming along. I'll still apologize for Manny, unabashedly admire KG, aim every cheap shot my tiny brain can conceive at Slappy McBluelips and Capt. Derek J. Intangibles, and pine for Jenna Fischer in an awkward and possibly law-violating way. I'll still be me, suckers. For some inexplicable reason they seem to want that. I'm as stumped as you are.

I suppose there's one thing that might change, but I desperately hope it doesn't - that's the quality of the commenters. One of the surprising joys for me is popping into the comments the morning after I post something and reading what you guys have to say. Sometimes your response is positive, and sometimes you tell me in so many words to go do something that from what I can tell is anatomically impossible. But your take is almost always well-articulated and reasonable, and often makes more sense than what I wrote. (Frankly, it pisses me off when that happens. Knock it off, smart guys.)

Seriously, what I'm saying, in my usual roundabout way, is that I hope all of you - and you know who you are - will follow me to the new address. As happy as I am to be doing this, it would not be as rewarding without you.

So that's that. I'm signing off for the night now. I look forward to seeing you in the comments in the morning. But I hope you already knew that.